The Story of Evolution 57 



appearing, a long-drawn-out sublime process like a great piece 

 of music. 



The Beginning of the Earth 



When we speak the language of science we cannot say "In 

 the beginning," for we do not know of and cannot think of any 

 condition of things that did not arise from something that went 

 before. But we may qualify the phrase, and legitimately inquire 

 into the beginning of the earth within the solar system. If the 

 result of this inquiry is to trace the sun and the planets back to a 

 nebula we reach only a relative beginning. The nebula has to 

 be accounted for. And even before matter there may have been 

 a pre-material world. If we say, as was said long ago, "In the 

 beginning was Mind," we may be expressing or trying to express 

 a great truth, but we have gone BEYOND SCIENCE. 



The Nebular Hypothesis 



One of the grandest pictures that the scientific mind has ever 

 thrown upon the screen is that of the Nebular Hypothesis. Ac- 

 cording to Laplace's famous form of this theory (1796) , the solar 

 system was once a gigantic glowing mass, spinning slowly and 

 uniformly around its centre. As the incandescent world-cloud of 

 gas cooled and its speed of rotation increased the shrinking mass 

 gave off a separate whirling ring, which broke up and gathered 

 together again as the first and most distant planet. The main 

 mass gave off another ring and another till all the planets, includ- 

 ing the earth, were formed. The central mass persisted as the sun. 



Laplace spoke of his theory, which Kant had anticipated 

 forty-one years before, with scientific caution: "conjectures which 

 I present with all the distrust which everything not the result of 

 observation or of calculation ought to inspire." Subsequent re- 

 search justified his distrust, for it has been shown that the original 

 nebula need not have been hot and need not have been gaseous. 



